Archive for July, 2014

Shrimp are now the most popular seafood in North America. More than lobsters or tuna or even salmon.

Whiteleg Shrimp: Who can resist this?(fiveinthechamber.com)

Getting shrimp to us has become infamous for all the collateral damage it has created. Shrimp trawlers, trawling for adults in the shallow tropics and sub-tropics of the world, have damaged bottom habitats and tossed out an immense load of unwanted bycatch – both features that should continue to condemn the method to oblivion.

Farming shrimp in coastal tidal ponds creates a whole different suite of equally damaging effects: mangroves are destroyed to make the ponds, and the ponds are moved every few years leaving behind nothing but devastation; pollution and waste are extensive; lethal disease is frequently widespread; salination of the underlying water table occurs; and in some regions people who do the farming or collect the fish for fishmeal may work in close to slave conditions, provoking concerns about human rights and social justice. It’s pretty well all bad.

One species in particular, the Whiteleg Shrimp (Litopanaeus vannamei) has become the species of choice for farms from Mexico and the Caribbean to India, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Indonesia and the Philippines. It is native to the warm Pacific coastal waters of Central America from Sonora Mexico south to Peru, and it grows faster, requires less protein to grow, and is more resistant to disease than other species. Everyone wants it.

Adult Whiteleg Shrimp, Litopanaeus vannamei (regisbador.com)

In 1990 a modest annual Whiteleg fishery of 90,000 tons existed. Then, as the mangrove farms in Asia embraced the species, the fishery grew huge, reaching 3.2 million tons in 2012, dominating the market.

In 2010, because of the mangrove destruction and the human rights abuses, Greenpeace designated Whiteleg Shrimp a Redlist species. A reasonable conclusion would surely be to say sayonara to the whole sorry mess of shrimp farming and trawling.

But all is not yet lost.

Gradually, ‘intensive’ farming has begun, moving the ponds away from the shores, though still dealing with water supply problems, contamination, and disease. Not great news, but better.

Then, in the past few years, a new method of ‘superintensive’ farming has emerged, and it is very promising. The shrimp are bred and the larvae are grown in hatcheries, and post-larvae are then shipped to inland culture facilities. At their best, these facilities grow the shrimp to market size in a few months in biosecure tanks under controlled temperature conditions, using recirculated sea water, requiring no pesticides or antibiotics.

Whiteleg Shrimp larvae are grown in hatching facilities and then sent to the super-intensive tank farms. (intechopen.com)

One of these super-intensive farms near Boston was featured recently in the NY Times, but 22 others are scattered across the US – in Iowa, Minnesota, even one near Las Vegas. This is revolutionary. Suddenly many of the problems associated with trawling or coastal pond culture disappear. No habitat destruction, no pollution, no added chemicals, no abused humans.

There’s sophisticated science to all this of course: selective breeding of Whiteleg adults to produce disease resistant larvae requires great care and patience. The largest breeding companies are now in Florida and Hawaii – the one on Molakai for instance. Comparable facilities in Vietnam and China now do their own selective breeding of Whiteleg for farms, but super-intensive tank culture is still uncommon there.

Meanwhile, the companies that have started tank farming in the US are quite excited. Should they be?

Their main remaining challenge is cost, and mostly they supply high end restaurants. But people in America are increasingly concerned that their food is produced in the least damaging way, agreeing to pay more for it where they need to.

Tank farmed Whiteleg Shrimp has now won the highest rating from Monterrey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. So let’s buy this stuff. Let’s insist on shrimp that have been raised in tank farms.

Then the tank farms will flourish and spread, replacing mangrove farms and shrimp trawls. The warm water coastal ecosystems will be far better off, bycatch will be radically reduced, and mangroves will not be destroyed for farming shrimp.

To reduce global overfishing, we struggle to nourish sustainable fishing through better regulations, monitoring and enforcement, by eliminating subsidies and destructive fishing methods, and by protecting coastal fishing communities and involving them in co-management.

At the same time, we are establishing more and larger Marine Protected Areas – MPAs. The total area protected has doubled since 2010. This is good news.

Currently, there are about 6000 MPAs around the world, varying immensely in size as well as in what actually gets protected.
Using his executive authority just as Presidents Bush and Clinton did before him, President Obama now is creating the largest MPA yet, this one in the South Central Pacific. The area is already partly protected as the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, but it will now become a lot larger, expanding from 224,000 sq km to 2,017,000 sq km – a little larger than Mexico – and it will become a lot more protected, prohibiting all commercial fishing.

The new Marine Protected Area proposed by President Obama will be huge, remote, isolated, and sparsely populated (propresobama.org)

The new MPA lies southwest of Hawaii and includes the ocean around Palmyra Atoll, Howard and Baker Islands, Kingman Atoll, and Wake Island (of World War II fame). It is so remote that the only commercial fishing there is for tuna – about 3% of the central and western Pacific catch now occurs there, and will have to shift. Remote indeed.

In fact a huge amount of what has been protected globally lies in the Pacific Ocean – the Coral Sea and around New Caledonia, the Great Barrier Reef, Papahanaumokuakea (in nw Hawaiian waters), and soon around both the Pitcairn Islands and Palau. All are huge MPAs, ranging from 360,000 sq km to 1.3 million sq km. Not surprisingly, most of them are also in the EEZs of remote and often sparsely populated islands.

Palmyra Atoll, southwest of Hawaii is one of the 7 islands around which the recently announced MPA will be established (e360yale.edu)

If it weren’t for the growing stresses of climate change, the South Pacific would be the safest region on the planet for tropical organisms to live. Despite the challenges of enforcing protective regulations where there are few people, little land, and lots of ocean, this is all very reassuring.

Palmyra Atoll has an airstrip, a protected lagoon, and few inhabitants: not a controversial site to protect (travel-images.com).

What if we look globally instead of just South Pacifically? Only about 1.17% of the world’s total ocean area is protected, and only about 2.86% of the world’s EEZs are protected. Since an MPA rarely means no fishing, just that some protection from some use occurs, even those low numbers are misleadingly high: of all the area covered by MPAs, only 8% is actually ‘no-take’, truly protected from fishing.

An MPA may still allow multiple uses, and only a restricted region is usually ‘no-take’ (pcoouncil.org).

Where a lot people actually live, on the crowded coasts of our continents, MPAs are so much harder to create. Those that exist are usually small, multi-use, and not isolated. The resistance to MPAs by commercial fishing, industrial users, residential users, everyone with any kind of stake, can be great.

At the other extreme, on the High Seas beyond the 200-mile EEZ limits of the world’s coastal countries, there really are few constraints and regulations, despite efforts at international cooperation. Protecting a lot of the South Pacific is possible only because of the many remote islands that exist there. The rest of the Pacific as well as the North and South Atlantic Oceans are a different matter.

Enforcement of existing or imagined protection remains the greatest challenge – but in coastal regions it could be done for much less than coastal nations currently spend on subsidizing their fisheries.

Meanwhile, dreams of protecting the High Seas drift closer to reality as discussions about High Seas no-take regions continue, even at the UN. Imagine making 60% no-take, enforced through automatic monitoring of all fishing vessels.

The conversation about MPAs is now also broadening to encompass ecosystem protection – safeguarding ecosystem services, including stronger links with coastal communities.

Obviously we have a long way to go to adequately protect our marine resources from ourselves, and getting there may look impossible. But it isn’t.